Rhines Rising Star Larry Hench Assistant Professor
BME Graduate Faculty Status
Education:
Ph.D., 2018, Duke University
Research Summary: Dr. Erika Moore is the inaugural Rhines Rising Star Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Florida. She defended her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in May of 2018. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2013. Dr. Moore’s work broadly focuses on understanding how immune cells can be leveraged to enhance tissue regeneration.
Under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer L. West at Duke University, Dr. Moore’s thesis focused on the use of macrophages, innate immune cells, to support vascularized engineered tissue. This work has been published in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Advanced Biosystems, and the journal of Regenerative Engineering and Translational Medicine. Dr. Moore was also awarded the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation award from Duke University for this work. Dr. Moore also worked as the Provost’s Post-Doctoral Fellow and a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering until June 2020. Working with Dr. Jennifer H. Elisseeff, Erika focused on profiling B cell responses to injury in small animal models. Ongoing research efforts of the Moore Lab seek to develop materials capable of directing immune cells towards desired clinical outcomes as well as developing in vitro tissue models to profile immune cell-blood vessel interactions in clinically relevant disease settings.
Recently acknowledged as Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Healthcare category, Dr. Moore is a former Trustee on the Duke Board of Trustees. She has been awarded the KL2 NIH Training grant through the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute, a Space Research Initiative grant, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Fellowship.